The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Seymour Hersh created a stir with his most recent piece in
the London Review of Books, Military to Military.

Hersh reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff under General
Dempsey had actively sabotaged President Obama’s Syria policy in 2013, when
they took issue with the White House’s apparent acquiescence to Turkey secretly
funneling support to unvetted Islamist militants.

The anti-Hersh forces have been in full cry but his claims
appears credible.Quite possibly, the
Pentagon has fallen out of love with wonk-warrior COIN fetish for the umpteenth
time, and has returned to the reassuring “massive use of conventional forces in
pursuit of explicit US goals” Powell Doctrine.Anyway, plenty of grist for the mill.

My interest, naturally, was attracted to Hersh’s description
of a “Uyghur rat-line” organized by Turkey to funnel militants from the PRC’s
Xinjiang Autonomous Region into Syria:

The analyst, whose views are
routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has been
bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been
agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim
terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then
flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He added that there was also what
amounted to another ‘rat line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range
from a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from China into
Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and then to IS territory in Syria.

Hersh also
quoted Syria’s ambassador to the PRC:

‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the
Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s
agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service
with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on
travelling into Syria.’

Hersh also consulted analyst Christina Lin (who quotes me!
In her pieces) on the Uyghur issue.

So the Uyghur angle in the LRB article leans on “the
analyst”, a source Hersh has relied on since 9/11 and whose conspicuous single-sourciness
has been a constant complaint of critics seeking to impugn Hersh’s reporting; a
Syrian official perhaps happy to add to Erdogan’s woes by hanging the Uyghur
issue around his neck; and an analyst dealing to a certain extent in open
source information.

Therefore, I paid attention to a statement Hersh made during
an interview with Democracy Now!, describing a study by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2013:

The third major
finding [in the study] was about Turkey. It said we simply have to deal with
the problem. The Turkish government, led by Erdogan, was—had opened—basically,
his borders were open, arms were flying. I had written about that earlier for
the London
Review, the rat line. There
were arms flying since 2012, covertly, with the CIA’s support and the support
of the American government. Arms were coming from Tripoli and other places in
Benghazi, in Libya, going into Turkey and then being moved across the line. And
another interesting point is that a lot of Chinese dissidents, the Uyghurs, the
Muslim Chinese that are being pretty much hounded by the Chinese, were
also—another rat line existed. They were coming from China into Kazakhstan,
into Turkey and into Syria. So, this was a serious finding.

Unless Hersh is carelessly interpolating a non-sequitur
about the Uyghurs in his remarks, it looks like his source told him there was a
JCS/DIA finding, based on classified sigint/humint, about Erdogan playing
footsie with Uyghur militants.

This is something I am inclined to believe, given the public
record concerning the Turkey-Uyghur special relationship, and also the bizarre
role of illicit Turkish passports in the travel of Uyghur refugees from
Xinjiang, through Southeast Asia, and to their publicly acknowledged safe haven
in Turkey.I’ve written about the
Turkey/Uyghur issue several times in 2015 including my July piece Uyghurs Move Edge Closer to Center of Turkish Diplomacy, Politics, and Geostrategic Calculation.

The other Uyghur related furor in the news
concerns Ursula Gauthier, the Beijing correspondent for L’Obs.It is speculated that
Gauthier will not get her journalist’s visa extended by the PRC, in retaliation
for an article she wrote pouring scorn on the PRC’s attempts to invoke a
massacre of ethnic-Han security personnel and miners, apparently by Uyghurs, at
Baicheng in Xinjiang, to claim “war on terror” parity with the November 13
Paris attack.

The attack occurred on
Sept. 18, when a group of knife-wielding suspects set upon security guards at
the gate of the Sogan Colliery in Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) prefecture’s Bay
(Baicheng) county, before targeting the mine owner’s residence and a dormitory
for workers.

When police officers arrived at the mine in Terek township to control the
situation, the attackers rammed their vehicles using trucks loaded down with
coal, sources said.

…

Ekber Hashim, a police
officer who inspected the mine’s dormitory following the incident, told RFA
that “nearly all the workers who were not on shift at the time were killed or
injured.”

“Some workers were sleeping while others were preparing to work when the
attackers raided the building after killing the security guards,” he said.

…

Terek township deputy
police chief Kurbanjan and his assistant “survived the incident by throwing
themselves into the river next to the colliery.”

“They went [to the mine] as part of a second team after five police officers,
including police chief Wu Feng, were killed,” said the officer, who also
declined to provide his name.

“The second team had no idea everyone in the first team had been killed when
they left the station. They turned their motorcycles around and fled when they
saw the dead and injured, but the attackers pursued them in trucks and they
were forced to drive the bikes into the river to escape.”

…

Another officer from
Bulung named Tursun Hezim said police had received a notice from higher level
authorities warning them to keep a lookout for a group of people wearing
“camouflage”—a tactic allegedly employed by suspects in other recent attacks in
the Uyghur region.

“Based on this guidance, I assume the suspects attacked while wearing uniforms,
which allowed them to catch the guards at the colliery and police on the road
when they were unaware and successfully make their escape,” he said.

One can’t believe everything one hears in the paper or on
RFA, but the Baicheng attack, though executed with primitive implements, does
not appear to have been the “Hulk Smash!” explosion of righteous rage by
innocent Uyghurs driven to vent their grievances against their oppressors.It was a careful, pre-meditated attack that
involved gulling mine security with the use of fake uniforms, murdering dozens
of peasant miners, then setting an ambush for two sets of cops as they rushed
to the scene.

Understandably, the PRC was keen to label this outrage
terrorism.The Western media, apparently
led by Gauthier, not so much.

Beleaguered journalists in the PRC may not appreciate my
opinion, but I considered Gauthier’s framing quite wrong-headed.Baicheng and Paris are, in my view, strikingly
similar in ways that Gauthier appeared unable to appreciate, as blowback
against ham-fisted government policies, as I wrote here.

Fact is, the Baicheng outrage appears to come uncomfortably
close to a very particular kind of “terrorism-that-we-don’t-want-to-call-terrorism”:
political violence committed as part of a decolonization/national liberation
struggle.

There is a sizable list of ethnic groups getting brutalized
by central government cum occupying
forces: Palestinians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Uyghurs…to name a few. Resistance by local ethnic/national/religious
movements may involve acts of violence intended to bring attention to the
cause, demoralize the occupiers, chip away at the resolve of the central
government and, in a rather less savory aspect, elicit a violent crackdown that
will escalate and spread the violence so local unrest is transformed into a
pervasive security and political crisis.

But openly claiming “national liberation struggle”
classification for Uyghur violence (instead of “localized inchoate fury”)
would involve acknowledging that some sort of movement with separatist aims
exists and poses a security threat to the PRC and its rule in Xinjiang.This would buttress PRC state propaganda,
contribute to the idea that there is something to all the ETIM talk, highlight
the existence of Uyghur militants embedded in Islamist groups in Afghanistan
and western Pakistan, and direct more professional interest to the efforts of
Turkey to exploit refugee Uyghurs as a paramilitary resource in Syria—as described
in Hersh’s article-- and potentially across Central Asia and into Xinjiang.

And it would involve Western media outlets giving up on the “PRC
is just making up ‘terrorism’/we can’t credence these reports until our
reporters can investigate freely” dodge, which is exemplified by a recurring phrase in RFA reporting on Uyghur-related violence that slides along the
explaining/excusing/condoning spectrum in reminding the reader that the Uyghurs
of Xinjiang suffer under continual, grinding repression.

“…experts outside China say Beijing has
exaggerated the threat from Uyghur “separatists” and that domestic policies are
responsible for an upsurge in violence that has left hundreds dead since 2012.”

It would also make life awkward for the World Uyghur
Congress and the Uyghur American Association which have carefully positioned
themselves as “not separatists” in order to obtain a platform in the West as
the voices of peaceful civil society and human rights aspirations of the Uyghur
people, for which they received grants of $275,000 and $295,000, respectively
from the National Endowment for Democracy in 2014 (the NED classifies this area
of activity as “Xinjiang/East Turkistan” which is, given the supposed
non-existence of the “East Turkistan Independence Movement”, somewhat
interesting).

Fact is, the PRC is not interested in creating a
Palestine-type situation in Xinjiang, with a non-violent/democracy inclined
opposition attracting sympathy and some diplomatic and material support from
the West.That’s probably why Ilham
Tothi, who had aspirations to serve as a secular/democratic voice of Uyghurs
within the autonomous region, is in jail.The PRC, relying on its military and economic power and, most
importantly, the demographic advantage it gains from submerging Uyghurs under a
tide of Han immigration (something the Baicheng attack was perhaps meant to
discourage), is probably willing to polarize the situation in Xinjiang through
oppressive policies and deal with whatever militancy its brutality throws
up.

In my opinion, the CCP sees Chechnya
as the worst-case template/resolution: a national liberation struggle co-opted and
discredited by an influx of Islamist-tinged terrorists who are, in turn,
destroyed by the state in a brutal, prolonged war, shattering the
secular/moderate independence movement in the process.

I expect this scenario will drive PRC diplomacy and security
policy throughout Central and South Asia in the foreseeable future; and the politically-inflected
debate over the existence of “terrorism” in the western reaches of the PRC will
be remembered with bitter nostalgia.

Republicans…have
called on congressional leaders to block the Obama administration from
proceeding with plans to resettle thousands of refugees…

In a letter to
Ryan, Ben Carson … called for Congress to block funding for any programs
"that seek to resettle refugees and/or migrants from Syria into the United
States, effective immediately."

"Until we
can sort out the bad guys we must not be foolish," Carson said…

Former Arkansas
Gov. Mike Huckabee similarly heaped pressure on Ryan, saying in a statement:
"Speaker Ryan needs to make it clear that if the President won't stand to
protect America from wholesale open borders, then Republicans will."

…

In addition,
Govs. John Kasich and Bobby Jindal of Ohio and Louisiana, respectively, said
they would work to keep refugees out of their states.

And Sen. Rand
Paul… introduced legislation that would block the United States from issuing
visas to refugees from countries with a high risk of terrorism in an effort to
"stop terrorists from walking in our front door."

[Cruz] has also said
Christians from war-torn Syria are victims and do not pose a risk of terrorism,
whereas letting in Muslim refugees would be "lunacy."

Jeb Bush, supposedly the worthy heir to America’s premier
terrorist-stomping dynasty, bumbled his way through his proposal for
prioritizing Syrian orphans and Christians in his endearingly incompetent
fashion.

Trump's shutdown statement looks like little more than escalation of
the “keep out the Syrian refugees” campaign that the Republicans, including
presidential candidates, governors, and legislators, had adopted post-Paris
massacre to wrongfoot President Obama and his attempts to contribute to
resolution of Europe’s refugee crisis.

Then came the San Bernardino massacre, committed by
non-Syrians, so some epistemological backfilling was necessary; and it was an
opportunity to kick it up another notch with a bigger, more grandiosely
Donaldesque ban.

Elements of the Republican establishment and the press,
desperate to stop Trump as a loose cannon not beholden either to the party or
its decisive megadonors , labored mightily to make Trump’s Muslim ban blather a
huge issue, the killer gaffe that would disqualify as presidential material.

However, efforts through the press to neutralize him through
public censure--“bigot” “fascist” etc.—do not appear to be getting much
traction.

I believe there’s a good reason for that.

When confronted by discriminatory speech and actions, some
make the high-minded appeal to Americans’ better nature: “this isn’t us.”

T’aint so, unfortunately.It’s more like “this was us and, apparently, still is at least some of
us and maybe a lot of us.”

And maybe “us” isn’t
just anxious blue-collar xenophobes.Maybe “us” includes a big chunk of the political elite and the
strategists who guide them.

Trump seizes upon the implicit and makes it explicit; that’s
his offense.And his strength.

A history of the synergy between popular bigotry, political
calculation, and institutionalized discrimination is enlightening.

African-American racial issues are, of course, the Big
Daddy.The US Constitution as written
consecrated slavery; the legal suppression of full black citizenship was
advertised as an existential imperative by Southern politicians both before and
after the Civil War; explicit de jure racism was not eliminated at the state
level until the 1960s; racial strategies have energized—and continue to
energize-- the political campaigns of tens of thousands of local and national
politicians over the last 180 years.Too
many Trumps to count, in other words.Including Trump, for that matter.

In the matter of religious bigotry, before the Muslims were
the distrusted intruders, it was the Jews.And before that, the Catholics.One of my favorite anecdotes in American history is the seizure of the Washington Monument in 1854 by the
Know-Nothing Party—which carried the banner of anti-Irish discrimination and
anti-Catholic bigotry in the pre-Civil War period-- as a publicity,
base-rallying and, inevitably, fund-raising scheme that will look very similar
to connoisseurs of current political gambits.

The Washington Monument, you see, was being contaminated by
“the Stone from Rome”, a gift of a venerable chunk of the Temple of
Concord by the Pope that was meant to be incorporated in the fabric of
the monument.Know Nothings invaded the
construction site, seized the stone, and apparently smashed it and dumped it
into the Potomac.Then they packed the
board of the governing body of the monument in order to grab control and
“protect” it and spent four years soliciting funds for the completion of the
project.Miraculously, the monument was
not completed (the US government eventually took it over to finish it off) and
the money vanished.

The essential Know-Nothing platform was
anti-immigration.It sought to lengthen
the residence requirement for immigrants to 25 years before they could gain
citizenship and vote.Nothing new under
the sun, is there, folks?

The Trump, if you will, of this exercise was Millard
Fillmore, who hoped to ride the Know Nothing wave to a second term as an
independent candidate (don’t bother to check your history books; he failed) and
provided political cover to the Know-Nothing shenanigans.

For institutionalized discrimination by region of origin, look no further than
the Chinese Exclusion Act, which strictly limited the entry of Chinese into the
United States from 1882 until 1943, when the whole “China is our ally in World
War II” thing led to repeal.In
excluding Chinese laborers, the Federal government was following the political wave
out of California, which clearly led the nation in anti-Chinese popular bigotry and official discrimination. Consider the legendary cover of the magazine The Wasp, mockingly proposing "A Statue for Our Harbor" i.e. San Francisco Bay. It depicts a ragged Chinese coolie in the Statue of Liberty pose, his foot on a skull, opium pipe in his hand, the rays with the words "Filth" "Immorality" "Disease" "Ruin to White Labor" forming a halo behind his head .

In its 1879
constitution, the State of California enshrined Article XIX:

SECTION 1. The Legislature shall
prescribe all necessary regulations for the protection of the State, and the
counties, cities, and towns thereof, from the burdens and evils arising from
the presence of aliens who are or may become vagrants, paupers, mendicants,
criminals, or invalids afflicted with contagious or infectious diseases, and
from aliens otherwise dangerous or detrimental to the well-being or peace of
the State, and to impose conditions upon which persons may reside in the State,
and to provide the means and mode of their removals from the State, upon
failure ore refusal to comply with such conditions; provided, that nothing
contained in this section shall be construed to impair or limit the power of
the legislature to pass such police laws or other regulations as it may deem
necessary.

SEC. 2. No corporation now existing or
hereafter formed under the laws of this State, shall, after the adoption of
this Constitution, employ directly or indirectly, in any capacity, any Chinese
or Mongolian. The Legislature shall pass such laws as may be necessary to
enforce this provision.

SEC. 3. No Chinese shall be employed
on any State, county, municipal, or other public work, except in punishment for
crime.

SEC. 4. The presence of foreigners
ineligible to become citizens of the United States is declared to be dangerous
to the well-being of the State, and the Legislature shall discourage their
immigration by all the means within its power. Asiatic coolieism is a form of
human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for
coolie labor shall be void. All companies or corporations, whether formed in
this country or any foreign country, for the importation of such labor, shall
be subject to such penalties as the Legislature may prescribe. The Legislature
shall delegate all necessary power to the incorporated cities and towns of this
State for the removal of Chinese without the limits of such cities and towns,
or for their location within prescribed portions of those limits, and it shall
also provide the necessary legislation to prohibit the introduction into this
State of Chinese after the adoption of this Constitution. This section shall be
enforced by appropriate legislation.

The Donald Trump of this particular episode was Dennis
Kearney, an ambitious, cynical demagogue whose anti-Chinese bigotry was
bookended with populist soak-the-rich, well maybe lynch-the-rich rhetoric.So he did not go far.But he did manage to elect the dominant bloc
in California’s constitutional convention (hence the anti-Chinese rhetoric
which, by the way, formed a baseline for the disastrous coolie labor policies in South Africa) and elect the mayor
and most of the municipal government of San Francisco.

When the Chinese
question is settled, we can discuss whether it would be better to hang, shoot,
or cut the capitalists to pieces. In six months we will have 50,000 mean ready
to go out. . . and if ‘John’ [the Chinese] don’t leave here, we will drive him
and his aborts [sic] into the sea… We are ready to do it… If the ballot fails,
we are ready to use the bullet.

The California legislature repealed Article XIX in
1952.However, its spirit still lives on
in legally unenforceable restrictive covenants for many neighborhoods in Los
Angeles which, as a perpetual condition of sale, forbid residence by members of
the “Negro or Mongoloid races”. Supposedly as many as 80% of residences in Los
Angeles are covered by restrictive covenants.In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these covenants could not be
enforced, thanks to the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution; however, it
declined to rule they were unconstitutional.

One thing that the War on Terror, Guantanamo, and NSA
collection has driven home is that the U.S. plays with a different, much
rougher book of rules when it is dealing with aliens and not U.S. citizens.

But then there’s Executive Order 9066, under which Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned during World
War II.That act, by the way, did not overtly
stipulate the internment of Japanese-Americans.What it did was give the Secretary of War and military commanders authority
to set up exclusion zones at their discretion:

to prescribe military
areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military
Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and
with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave
shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the
appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.

Lieutenant General John De Witt, in charge of Western
Defense Command covering the west coast of the continental United States,
exercised his discretion to first to curfew, then relocate, and ultimately
confine over 100,000 Japanese Americans.The military authorities in Hawaii, on the other hand, chose only to
intern 2270 of its 140,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans residents.

The Donald Trump of the anti-Japanese scare in California:
none other than future Supreme Court Justice and civil rights avatar Earl
Warren.Here’s a nice passage:

When Gerald Ford got around to rescinding E.O. 9066 in 1972,
a commission determined that the internment was not justified by military
necessity, so there was an apology and some financial restitution—but no legal
sanction.

Apparently the whole wartime necessity/executive order thing
was constitutional.And as alert readers
are well aware, the state of emergency President George W. Bush declared after
9/11 by executive order is still in effect today.Here’s a link for the curious and/or anxious.

Long story short, various streams of bigotry continually
burble along in American society.When
politicians sense an opportunity in an atmosphere of crisis, fear, and
dissatisfaction, they can convert these toxic sidestreams into the mainstream, normalize them and, if conditions permit,
institutionalize them in the generous nooks and crannies offered by the
constitution at least long enough for electoral and/or financial success,
albeit at the cost of thousands of lives blighted by fear and prejudice and worse.

A postal worker
arrested on hate crime charges had allegedly bumped into and spat on a Muslim
woman before following her into a deli and threatening to burn down her place
of worship, New York City police said. Dainton Coley, 34, was still wearing his
Postal Service uniform when he was led out of a police precinct in handcuffs
Tuesday night.

'I am going to burn your 'f**king' temple,'
Coley said, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

One of them woman reportedly told him that he
was crazy, but he replied, 'I’m not crazy, I work in the post office'.

And this, from a viral Facebook post concerning a woman’s alleged encounter on a bus in Chicago:

A man screamed at me.
Called me a sand ni**er. Told me I was the problem. That I need to get the fuck
out of his country… Then this man spits at me. A man in a suit and tie. Like
anyone else I'd see. He spits at me and looks at me with these regular eyes now
filled with anger and tells me to get the fuck off the bus, do what I'm told,
because this isn't my country. This isn't my place.

For the requisite irony, the woman wasn’t even Muslim.She was half-Iranian, half-Irish, and “may
have been wearing my scarf higher on my head than usual because it was cold
out.”

Anyway, hate is as American as apple pie.So is pandering to it.So is Trump.